Commercial enterprises rely on marketing campaigns to attract consumers to their products, build consumer rapport, and obtain consumer information for future business decisions. Traditional marketing campaigns typically include advertisements, promotions, and coupons directed to a wide audience in hopes that many members of the audience will use the promotions. However, many marketing campaigns are unsuccessful as potential consumers view the promotions merely as unwanted nuisances. In addition, potential consumers receiving offers often naturally distrust the source of the promotional offers. Gaining this trust is a difficult hurdle for marketers.
Traditional marketing campaigns employ electronic media to distribute electronic promotions (e.g., coupons) of products or service. However, the use of electronic media typically mimics techniques of traditional campaigns, such as by placing banner advertisements in an Internet-based format, resulting in the same difficulties and failures as the more traditional marketing campaigns. For example, electronic promotions can be offered to a potential customer by sending an unsolicited electronic mail to the customer or an electronic coupon can be posted as an advertisement on a webpage. For the example coupon-offering schema, consumers are often hesitant to use the unsolicited coupons and even those seeking coupons would have difficulties finding the appropriate and trustworthy webpage.
Computer-implemented social networks are becoming increasingly popular, especially by young consumers. Social networks generically include a plurality of members, each of whom has a group of friends who are also members of the social network. The social networks allow for the sharing of social and personal information amongst the group of friends. Existing marketing campaigns for social networks typically mimic traditional advertising and promotional campaigns, such as through the use of online banner ads and unsolicited promotional offers. The communal nature of the social network allows for the distribution of promotional offers amongst a group of friends and commonly results in a more economical and effective distribution method for a promotional offer compared to traditional distributed electronic promotions due to each receiver of a promotional offer already having a friend or contact list present and a level of trust already being established between friends within a group. People have had a measure of influence over the purchase of products and services for generations. However, businesses have had very limited success with tacking and measuring the influence of social networking members on groups of friends to engage in electronic commerce.
One approach to overcome this labor intensive process is an automated tracking system that includes product-specific hyperlinks that allows potential customers to link to a merchant's website to initiate purchases of such products from the merchant. Each product-specific hyperlink is provided within a catalog document in association with referral information that is transmitted to the merchant's site when a user (customer) clicks on the product-specific hyperlink. The referral information includes a unique ID of a member and a unique ID of the selected product. Referral processing software running on the merchant site uses the referral information to identify a member associated with the catalog and that referred the customer to the merchant site, and to identify the product selected from the catalog. If the customer subsequently purchases the selected product from the merchant site, the referral processing software automatically credits the referring member for the referral by, for example, applying a commission to an account of the member.
However, such an approach is not capable of tracking subsequent transactions or re-referrals. Instead, such an approach utilizes static product-specific hyperlinks associated with fixed referral information, such as a unique ID of a member and a unique ID of the selected product, in order to track transactions or referrals that originate from a catalog associated with a member. In such an approach, subsequent transactions or re-referrals that result from exposure of the customer to the catalog, product, merchant's Website, etc., are incapable of being tracked and used to measure the influence that the originating member and/or the customer had on any subsequent transaction or re-referral. Tracking and measuring the influence of members in social networks based merely on use of static product-specific hyperlinks provides for an imperfect service, as it fails to take into consideration the influence on subsequent transactions or re-referrals from friends of the member and friends of the those friends. Further, and potentially worse, “high influence” members may not be identified properly for potential targeted advertising opportunities because the influence on subsequent transactions or re-referrals from friends of the member and friends of those friends is not being taken into consideration.